Bricks Without Straw: Black America, The West Louisville Forum & the Need to Shift the Giving Paradigm

There’s a special kind of torment that you sometimes see actively rupturing among some of the more socially-responsible or at least ‘right-inclined’ members of the white community once the sheer profoundness of black disadvantage really starts to sink in. Or maybe it’s not just the fact of its sheer profoundness. But rather it’s the sort of ‘Deep Impact’ moment of becoming aware of all the ways in which every dimension of white life is predicated on that disadvantage. And that to inhabit whiteness as an American without participating in a type of politics that points a way out of that societal and economic parasitism is to remain basically complicit in its production. It’s like witnessing in real time all of those little switch valves that a white psyche possesses in order to divert the flow of difficult and awful truths all suddenly beginning to not open anymore.